Blog Murder

Is there a reason Dave Winer just killed 3000 blogs -- like this one (Tom Matrullo's) and this one (Dean Landsman's) and this one (Craig's Booknotes)-- and no one, including Slashdot has the balls to write about it?!

At least he's taken the gloves off -- if you thought he was a cuddly teddy bear friend of all bloggers -- you might want to rethink that.

[Editor's note (6/18/04): The text at the different blogs I linked to above keeps changing, so I've removed the links. When I wrote this, this was the language that was posted at Tom's, Dean's and Craig's blogs:

This site is for people with sites that used to be hosted at weblogs.com.

1. I can't afford to host these sites. I don't want to start a site hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements.

2. There are several commercial Manila hosting companies, including weblogger.com. Thomas Creedon maintains a list of commercial and free hosting services. If you want to have your site hosted more cheaply, consider the possibility of forming a co-op of some kind.

3. If you want a copy of your weblogs.com-hosted website, post a comment here, include the URL of the site. Sometime after July 1, 2004, I will export all the requested sites, without their membership groups. You can then download them and do with them as you wish. I won't export them before July 1, and this is a one-time offer.

And if you want to take the time to read what I wrote -- I never called anyone a "murderer" as some have claimed -- and my question was why no one else had written about it. The people I was taking to task were others in the community who hadn't bothered to write about it. And I'm glad that now they have.]